Tracking has a bad reputation — unfairly
When people say "project tracking," many picture dashboards demanded by management. But real tracking is a service to the team: knowing early that a task is stuck, a deadline is slipping, someone is overloaded. Early, meaning while there's still time to act.
Three rituals are enough
1. The daily stand-up (15 minutes)
Three questions per person: done, blocked, planned. No detailed problem-solving in the meeting — blockers get handled afterward, by the right people. On a shared Kanban board, this can take five minutes.
2. The iteration review
At the end of a sprint or week: demo what's actually finished, gather feedback, adjust scope. The golden rule: only demo what's actually usable.
3. The team retrospective
Twenty minutes, three questions: what made work flow better? what slowed it down? what will we actually change? One commitment made, and kept.
The metrics worth keeping on hand
- Tasks completed vs planned for the period: the immediate health check.
- Blocked tasks and how long they've been blocked: the first warning sign.
- Workload per person: catch overload before burnout.
This is exactly what the Reports & Analytics module calculates at every time scale — watch the numbers move in the analytics demo.
The right reflex: from number to action
A metric with no action attached to it is decoration. Every number you read should lead to a concrete question: "this task's been blocked for five days — what does it need to get unblocked?" — then to a tracked action in Kanban. That's the full loop: measure to come back to the work that produces the number.